Sunday, February 23, 2014

Ravellenic Winter Games 2014

So much has happened since my last post it feels like a year, at the same time I can't believe February is coming to a close. Didn't it just start yesterday?

Another thing that is coming to a close is the Olympics. Today is the last day of the Olympics and that means Ravellenic Winter Games 2014 is also coming to a close. Ravellenic is a chance for knitters and spinners to ignore real life to watch the Olympics and challenge themselves to extraordinary knitting feats while eating chocolate. The chocolate is in rules, I don't make these things up. I couldn't let Ravellenic pass without note since this year has been such a big one for me.

I came home from a New Years Eve party to a push, a tease, from Bungalow312 to captain the Stash and Burn team. I had already been thinking about it but didn't want to step in on anyone else's plans but that push at 2am and me full of party exuberance I was off and running.

Never mind that 2am and full of party exuberance might not be the appropriate
time to be picking out team names, tags, setting rules and planning prizes. But it worked out ok and that one moment has snowballed into an event!

Our team is low key and fantastic! As I set up a website to collect donations so Jenny and Nicole could buy us prize yarn at Stitches West, a team member spontaneously made artwork for banners, buttons, and avatars. While I asked designers to donate patterns as prizes the main board exploded into drama over Russian politics and a team members spontaneously knit a No Drama Llama that we now have as mascot.

One of the challenges I set myself was to spin some difficult fiber.

I decided that I wanted to use the yarn as a prize and I wanted the prize to be meaningful.

Jenny has mentioned loving yak yarn more than once and I love yak fiber probably more than any other, proving yet again that Jenny and I am the same person, it was an easy choice to pull this yak/silk roving from my stash.

It took four hours to spin up 140 yards of DK weight yarn. This is the softest, most luxurious yarn I have ever made. Ever.

It wasn't spun without incident or injury either. As I watched Shaun White crash and burn on the snowboard track I also had issues with soft spots and control as the yarn hit rough spots or drifted apart. That pile of snarls are the casualties of the night.